We do so hope the following is true, as it’s a wonderful image, although an outdated gender stereotype. Today the correspondent would no doubt have filmed the antics of the Exquisite and uploaded them to YouTube, or taken a photo to mock him on Facebook or Twitter. But not so back in the days of the Regency. Then, it was a letter to a paper (written in August 1818) and a satirical print (published in 1819) instead.

Image courtesy of Lewis Walpole Library

AN EXQUISITE ALIAS DANDY IN DISTRESS!

A correspondent furnishes us with the following picture of an Exquisite alias a Dandy in distress. “Walking in one of the squares last week it was my fate to follow an Exquisite, stock’d and stay’d laced and bound collar’d and pilloried in all the fashion, so slender so straight and so stiff that a man of ordinary strength might have used…